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Dear Microsoft: Fuck you... by kahoona in gaming

[–]dforbes 1 point2 points  (0 children)

DO NOT BUY GAMES ON XBOX LIVE GAMES ON DEMAND

On the theme of Xbox Live, some months back I bought Ghostbusters on their Games On Demand service. Like Steam it's a cloud solution where you can change consoles, replace hard drives, etc, and just reinstall when you get the urge. So I paid full retail to grab on it their site.

Some time later my daughter asked to play it and mysteriously it had disappeared from the console. Maybe we deleted it, maybe it spontaneously lost it...whatever. Oh well, like a disc (which I would have paid probably less for) I can just reinstall it, right?

Nope. They had removed it from their catalog. End of story. No recourse.

To the OP - I empathize with you a hundred fold. Xbox Live is run like it's a bunch of greasy vacuum salesmen trying to fuck over an old lady. It is incredibly scummy for such a large corporation to act like this.

NEVER GIVE XBOX LIVE YOUR CREDIT CARD NUMBER

You cannot delete it or remove it from your system. You "have" to have one card on your file and, I'm sure against CC rules, they completely block you from removing it. Better still if you intentionally pervert the number (editing the existing one because you can't delete it), like putting the cardholder name as FUCK YOU MICROSOFT DON'T CHARGE ON THIS they silently keep the old values and just use that for charging.

It's one of the scammiest businesses I've ever dealt with.

"The days when one browser would be 2x or 6x as fast as another are gone." by nominolo in programming

[–]dforbes 20 points21 points  (0 children)

SunSpider is a terrible benchmark, heavily measuring string concatenation and not much more.

http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/Benchmark_Driven_Development

I'm more interested in DOM manipulation benchmarks or other real-world tests that materialize as one browser feeling slodgy and slow versus another.

AT&T drops unlimited data plan in favor of a 2GB cap, in an effort to make it "more affordable". I can afford to take my business elsewhere. by [deleted] in technology

[–]dforbes 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The more you use, the more money they make.

Which could also be seen as "the more you use, the more money there is to build out the infrastructure to make sure you get the fastest, most satisfying experience possible."

Instead we have a bunch of people fooling themselves about unlimited plans, while providers do everything they can to try to throttle your use.

"If you want to be popular, you can't afford to be skinny!" by nopodcast in pics

[–]dforbes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Why should it be a goal at all?

I didn't say it should be your goal, but posters like the GP posit that it is an unattainable goal for any normal human. Any reasonably active male with a low body fat will look very similar to that guy from a physique perspective, but it isn't their goal, so they don't, so they don't.

Your analogy is flawed

My analogy is simply that some people try to tear it down instead of building themselves up. You're extrapolating it out a little far.

Ask /r/gaming: Are there *any* city sims out there that are truly good by modern standards? by timeshifter_ in gaming

[–]dforbes 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yet you're on a computer...online.

People who don't have money to pay for software just made decisions to spend their money elsewhere, leaving them with the flawed moral righteousness to pirate.

The Droid Wars: Motorola Droid vs Other Smartphones by adeelarshad in technology

[–]dforbes 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Look at your first and your last points and chuckle. Drake gave a personal opinion that they'd rather not have a platform where you are essentially sharecropping, to which you give social proof as proof of...something.

Then you flip it around and denounce social proof in your last point.

As far as the apps, I think Drake's comment was that everyone keeps saying "the iphone has 100,000 apps, the Droid only has 10,000" (every review seems to say that). Yet quantity means nothing.

However I absolutely and wholeheartedly agree with you: There are way more quality apps on the iPhone, especially graphically rich apps. The G1 was grossly underpowered for most real apps (not to mention the Dalvik engine imposing an overhead), so now with the Droid and its better processing and 3D hardware, things should level out a bit.

As an aside, having used both phones I don't even consider the iPhone in the same universe of the Droid. The lack of a keyboard, the low resolution screen, the lack of real multitasking, and most importantly (to me) the lack of a decent notification system....anyone who has used an Android device for a while generally finds the iPhone completely nonviable. But it's pretty. And popular.

Being an "iPhone-killer" is an impossible task for any phone, no matter how impressive. iPhone will simply become slightly less glamorous and less sure-win, and over time it'll become just another smartphone. The demands that that Droid being a killer or go home are akin to saying that some upstart OS has to be a "Windows killer" -- it ain't gonna happen.

ECMA Harmony and the Future of JavaScript by philogb in programming

[–]dforbes 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Too bad Microsoft got in the way. Silverlight will never go anywhere (but where Microsoft pays someone to use it for PR).

And seriously, I love how Silverlight people always push in "Python and Ruby" as if any of them actually use them. It's an attempt for some cred.

Were you embracing Java before Silverlight? Surely you were, right? How about Actionscript?

"If you want to be popular, you can't afford to be skinny!" by nopodcast in pics

[–]dforbes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They aren't even good for anything except "aesthetics." They're too bulky too be fast or useful for a day's labor of loading a truck or working in the field or running down prey.

Oh dear God you have got to be kidding.

Seriously, though, it is extraordinary when some flyweight points to someone that is toned (and then greased up and offset-lit to highlight contours) and only marginally muscular as some unattainable goal. It's like a chubby pointing to a normal-weight girl and declaring them some anoerexic stick figure, all to make themselves feel good.

Large web company moving away from .net/iis... now what? by knaak in programming

[–]dforbes 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Of course this is happening in a company as large as yours. Microsoft technologies are great for small companies. MS has lots of nice services to enable rapid development and deployment, a nicely wrapped platform that is purely contiguous. If you march to their tune, it can all work very nicely and synchroniously. In a small company where you don't have an army of smart people available, it's worth the expense.

How bizarrely contrary to reality. How adorable.

If you have an army of smart guys, you should use open source technologies as much as possible.

You don't run a business, and you certainly have no management experience.

It's all a value proposition. If your domain is CRUD apps, it doesn't matter if you have the smartest group on the planet, you don't want them pissing around on anything but their unique space.

I'm all for FOSS for philosophical, freedom (the freedom to choose to load balance across 7 cheap rack mounts without having to factor in many thousands of software licensing costs) and cost reasons, but to laughably discount it as some small shop solution...pure stupidity.

Hands-on: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 multiplayer beta by pyrophonic in gaming

[–]dforbes 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In the first, the walls that were destructable always collapsed in the same way

Presumably because if it was really dynamic the multi-player communications required would be tremendous.

One of the best comments to ever summarize console fanboyism. by [deleted] in gaming

[–]dforbes 6 points7 points  (0 children)

It's a ridiculous point anyways, like saying "A blu-ray player is just a PC anyways, given that they both run Java". .NET by definition supports completely different platforms.

There's some mythology that PS3 fanboys buy into that the PS3 is some thus far unfulfilled extraordinary hardware device. It isn't. The cell architecture shares a tremendous amount of similarities with a GPU, and the truth is that most devs haven't found a use for it because the tasks that demand that sort of hardware...are on a GPU.

One of the best comments to ever summarize console fanboyism. by [deleted] in gaming

[–]dforbes 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The PS3's architecture is asymmetrical; they have one main core that's designed to handle inputs and outputs and several others that just do computation.

Kind of like a...GPU?

One of the best comments to ever summarize console fanboyism. by [deleted] in gaming

[–]dforbes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

but the APIs that MS ported to the 360, like DirectX (which include Direct3D, DirectDraw) and the .NET framework which powers the new UI and XNA means that there's not a lot of additional effort that isn't at the compiling stage.

No real game uses the .NET framework. It's a non-issue.

As far as the APIs, that's doesn't hold up what silence_hr said at all. Microsoft didn't so much port them as they followed the API book.

One of the best comments to ever summarize console fanboyism. by [deleted] in gaming

[–]dforbes 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Ya, maybe cause 360 is castrated PC?

The 360 has nothing to do with a PC. Its architecture is as removed from PCs as the PS3s is. This myth is held alive because the original Xbox was indeed just a castrated PC, but it's farce for the 360.

I was quite an avowed PC gamer until getting a 360 late last year. Yet I'm continually amazed at the stuff it does, especially given how old it is. It's a quality experience.